ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition X79 review

Mainboards 327 Page 24 of 24 Published by

teaser

Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition has to be one of the more amazing motherboards that I have seen to date. I dig the performance, tweakability, features... I love that. 

If you are a novice overclocker and go for easy, flick an OC preset in the BIOS and boom, you are locked & loaded. Overclocking itself with the UEFI BIOS is fun as well, it really is an easy-to-work-in environment. For overclocking itself we reached 4800 MHz in a matter if minutes though that really was the maximum for our 4960 processor based on our cooling. Mind you though that we work with vanilla picked engineering sample CPUs, we can never guarantee you'll achieve the same results at home. It works vice versa as well, we've seen end-users with much higher overclocks then we have ever achieved, good on ya!

Really, this is quality at its best added with features and easy ways to overclock your processor and memory. Still, this ROG piece of hardware remains to be focused mainly at tweakers. But man, the Rampage VI Black is a haaaawteeh! But we also acknowledge that is will be a little more difficult to position product as it is pushed so extremely far into the pro-overclockers range with the OC Panel and LN2 functions and so on. 

Aesthetics

Looks are subjective. Some like skinny, thin some require a little booteeeh... but hey taste matters yet differ. And that makes this a tidbit personal, I find the Rampage IV Black Edition is an extremely good looking motherboard with a proper layout and stuffed with features. I really seem to dig the all dark design; but let me simply show you what I mean:

8521_img_9775-png

Now how is that not sexy? So yeah, we have little to complain, the board layout itself is pretty good, you could complain about it being EATX and thus a bit bigger, but well... at an enthusiast level, who cares about that anyway. There are so many extra ICs on the motherboard that there hardly is any room left for anything else so the EATX form factor was needed. Each square inch was tucked full and the many power phases will make sure each component has the right and stable amount of juice flowing through it.

The OC Panel

The OC panel is a hot little gadget, I mean, Batman could take this out of his utility belt! Monitoring your processor, overclocking, VGA hot-wiring it all is possible with the cool panel. If you decide not to use it, simply house it into the PC with the delivered 5.25" tray you can build into your chassis. I do like the OC panel, yet I somehow always revert to BIOS based overclocking, but that's my personal preference I guess. This is more for the pro-overclockers with a bottle of LN2 in one hand and the OC Panel in the other screaming pirate noises like HARRR!!!

Overall

The overall per core performance remains seriously nice, Turbo 2.0 kicks in nicely up-to 4.0 GHz at default. We really like the included Wireless LAN and Bluetooth functionality as well. Especially bringing WIFI towards AC is a great thing to do. The baseline performance of the Rampage IV Black edition is above any other X79 motherboard, as ASUS keeps the Turbo's pinned at 4 GHz. That brings in a little extra over say the reference clocked products. With a price tag of roughly 380 EUR the Rampage IV Black edition isn't one of the cheaper models alright, buit is serves a very specific crowd and does bring a lot to the table. It's a very well thought through motherboard that brings an excellent foundation towards the X79 chipset.
 

Award-best-hardware-200-new

Final Words

ASUS has an incredible good looking, feature rich and tweaking wise, impressive offering at hand with their Rampage IV Black Edition. The thing is so feature rich that we can't even explain everything it has to offer! The 10 SATA ports are very sweet, six of them SATA 6 Gb/s. You get 7.1 channel HD audio that is pimped up by quality components Supreme FX and a dedicated headphone amp.  Then the motherboard is multi-GPU up-to 4-way SLI and Crossfire ready. And sure add to that the sporty kit like the AC ready WIFI. Lacking however is an mSATA module, which is growing to become more and more popular. Right, time to wrap things up. We really like the Rampage IV Black Edition, but also acknowledge that it probably is a product best served to pro-overclockers solely. The reality is that 99% of you guys that will have a good heat-pipe cooler or All In One Liquid cooling kit, each and everyone of you will reach 4500~4700 MHz as maximum and for that you do not need an OC Panel or all the LN2 features this board has to offer. All these features come at a street price of 380 EUR / 399 USD. We do acknowledge though that with the included gear, features and that OC Panel we say that it is a fair price for a superb quality motherboard.

This motherboard serves a very specific type of end users alright. If you are intrigued by it, then that description applies directly to you. Highly recommended and we'll grant it our most hard to get best hardware award. It is a fantastic product with the looks to kill for. Oh and hey, you'll receive a free game key for Assasins Creed IV Black Flag as well.

Handy related downloads: 

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print